Overview

I picked this notebook because it was the only one that I was familiar with at that time that fit my minimum expectations. It’s 4.3 pounds, which makes it pretty portable by my standards. It has a bright and sharp 13.3″ wide screen that’s not too big, and gives me lots of room for all my windows. The NVIDIA video card is well supported by Linux and carries 64 Mb of its own dedicated ram as well as borrows 64 Mb (shared) from my 1 Gb of ram. This video cards, although not the best, definitely has the advantage of showing me more detail, colour, texture and can keep up with most effects that I desire.

The Pentium M 1.8 GHz processor is more than I need. Unlike my previous laptops, this one came with a hardware wireless turn on/off button. That makes my life easier when I want to just cut the wireless access for both security and power conservative reasons. The speakers are decent and so is the sound card. The wireless card IPW2200bg is the most supported wireless card I know. Both Intel and the community are working together on the drivers. Currently the drivers for this card support every mode I know (Master, Ad-Hoc, Managed, Monitor, Promiscuous). The battery went a bit more than 3 hours under normal use (VMware, music, and some web browsing). With the extended battery it should go up to 8 hours. It also has a DVD burner (dual layer capable), the speeds are not the highest but they are fine for my needs. The hard disk is 100 Gb SATA and works great. What worries me are the hinges that attach the LCD, they look to me as if they are pretty thin. Over all it doesn’t have too many flashy and unnecessary things. I found its interface to be quite simple yet stylish.

Installation

I used elive 0.4.2 CD from http://elivecd.org/gb/Download/Stable/, though installation of other distributions should be similar. First time I tried it out, it seemed to pick up almost everything for me. This version of elive did not recognize the SATA hard disk automatically, so you have to load the ata_piix module before installing to hard disk. Open a terminal (leftmost button on the bottom pannel):

su
modprobe ata_piix

Next you can check if it found it by typing dmesg. You should see it displaying you that it found a SCSI drive e.g.: sda. Familiarize yourself with this distro before installing. Then proceed and install it by clicking the most right icon at the bottom panel. This should start the installation process.

If you have installed Linux before then the installation process should be easy. Make sure you load the ata_piix module!

A prompt will come up asking you if you have a sata disk. You should agree. Your disk name should be sda. Partition and install the system.

Warning! I did not want to keep any copies of Windows XP Home on the hard disk, I simply wiped the recovery partition created by Sony, if you are unsure about installing Linux on your laptop or want to dual boot Windows, be carefull not to remove that partition.

Once you boot into elive it will ask you for your language and timezone settings. Then it will throw you into shell. Login.

Kernel Compilation

You will need to download a kernel and set it up so that you can compile specific modules for it. We are currently interested in ipw2200 and nvidia modules. You can use your distribution’s binaries, if they exist, ipw2200 is also available as a built-in kernel module, but I prefer to use the one compiled from source, as it is more recent and has more features (for example, the newest versions of the driver have the ability to create a virtual promiscuous interface at the same time as the card is associated to a network in managed mode).

Set up your network interface so that you can get Internet access.After getting your networking set up you will need to install several packages to be able to compile. Then you will need to get and compile the kernel. The commands below will compile your kernel using my config file. Note that this is not minimalistic kernel, it also has support for bluetooth (via a USB adapter), all possible encryption algorithms (for use with WPA, for example) and some other thing which may be useful.

Wireless Drivers

Unarchive all three packages. Compile ieee80211 stack first, then ipw2200, then put all firmware files (including the license) into /lib/firmware/. Run load script located in the ipw2200 directory.

Run iwconfig to make sure you have your interface recongnized. Configure it using iwconfig and ifconfig. Consult their manual pages for specific options.

Sony Vaio Fn-keys

I found this section on the web and it seems to work very well. Basically what we will do is setup an event router. So a program that we will install will listen for any event we ask it to listen to, and if that event occurs it will run our command.

Download and install evrouter, nvclock and smartdimmer; nvclock is available from standard Debian repositories via apt-get.

Now whenever you press the Fn+ (F1-F12) it would give you a different key. This will tell you what is the number of the key to which you would want to assign something.

We will now create a file for each user that will match the keys to commands or scripts that you will want to execute when that key is pressed. This file will be located inside each user’s directory and it will be called .evrouterrc. You should also create this file for root in /root. The file should have read permissions.

Assigns the Fn + F11 key to run xscreensaver daemon and lock the screen. This is usefull if you want to quickly leave your laptop, so you just press this key and it locks the laptop in screensaver mode. Note: For the lock to be effective you need to logout of other terminals that you access through alt + F(1-8).

For all of the above commands to work you need to get all the scripts and put them in the appropriate directories with appropriate (executable) permissions. You also need to have these packages installed: xscreensaver, aumix, hibernate.

The following commands need to be executed (preferably on startup) for the Fn keys to work.

The above commands would allow a normal user to change sound volume. They would also allow the user to read events and after making sure that another evrouter script is not running, it will turn on evrouter. This script should be in a file that starts on boot.

Sleep and Hibernate

To hibernate (suspend to disk), which means that your computer will store everything to disk and then completely shutdown, you need to download and install the hibernate program (available from standard Debian repositories). Issuing hibernate -f put my laptop to hibernate, then by pressing the power key I turn it back on and after booting for a bit it returns me to the gui I was in.

To sleep (suspend to memory), which means that your computer will store everything to memory and continue powering it, you need to download the suspend.sh script and place it into /usr/local/sbin with executable permissions. Suspending to memory is much faster and waking up is also much faster.

Like this:

Related

Unlike Fedora 12, I encountered no strange install errors during installation. Unlike Linux Mint, there were no mysterious kernel panic lockups. Madwifi was also available as a package, which means I didn’t have to compile madwifi. Wicd package was available in Opensuse’s build service, but was more tricky to install than Linux Mint.